In the covenant that God made with Noah, he laid down a law:

Whoever sheds the blood of man,

by man shall his blood be shed,

for God made man in his own image.

The basis for prohibiting murder was that it was the destruction of a person made in God’s image, so it is taught. But how do we understand image? Is it in physical appearance?

According to Scholastic theologians the image of God is the mental and rational aspects of humans. God is seen as infinite knowledge and perfect logic.

Calvinist teachings explain it as a combination of human’s ability to reason and the vice-regency of humans. That is, humans are to rule over the earth and reflect God’s manner of dealing with the world.

However, neither of these views seem very complete since it would excuse killing, say, a mentally incapacitated individual or someone who was too lazy to rule over what God had given. For, hypothetically speaking, these individuals would have potentially ceased to reflect God’s image.

There are also problems with the view that God’s image is the ability to reason, for satan is surely more intelligent in purely rational terms than humans. He must be in order to deceive them all!

I believe that God’s image is the capacity to willingly expend the self for the sustenance of the life of another–both physically and spiritually. For this reason God gave Eve to Adam; that he might sustain her in love. For this reason humans are placed over all the earth; to care for and sustain it as, through God’s providence they are also sustained through it. For support of this view we need look nowhere but to the cross, where the one act that communicates the fulness of the relationship that God desires between him and humanity was the expenditure of his own life.

Therefore, the command to not murder was not just because the murdered individual was created in the image of God, but because the act of killing was the destruction of God’s image in the murderer to the fullest possible extent (physically speaking).

Each covenant that God established revealed more than the previous about the relationship God sought to have with people. To Adam and Eve he only promised the coming of one who would crush Satans head. But now to Noah he reveals a bit more of the character of this relationship. By using the most obvious act of the taking of life, God communicates that at it’s most simple and profound, God desires a relationship of mutual self giving to nurture the life of another.